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About a year ago, in a moment of procrastination masquerading as an act of reflection, I decided to examine how I spend my time. I opened my laptop, clicked on the carefully synched, colour-coded calendar and attempted to reconstruct what I’d actually done over the previous two weeks.

When I stepped back to assess this welter of information – a pointillist portrait of what I do and therefore, in some sense, who I am – the picture that stared back was a surprise: I am a salesman.

Most of what I do doesn’t directly make a cash register ring. In that two-week period I worked to convince a magazine editor to abandon a silly story idea, a prospective business partner to join forces, an organisation where I volunteer to shift strategies, even an airline gate agent to switch me from a window seat to an aisle.

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Indeed, the vast majority of time I’m seeking resources other than money. Can I get strangers to read an article? An old friend to help me solve a problem? Or my nine-year-old son to take a shower after his baseball practice?

You’re probably not much different. Dig beneath the sprouts of your own calendar entries and examine their roots, and I suspect you’ll discover something similar.

In Australia, some one in 10 workers earns a living trying to get others to make a purchase. They may have traded sample cases for smartphones and are offering experiences instead of encyclopedias, but they’re still in traditional sales.

More startling, though, is what’s happened to the other nine in 10. They’re in sales, too. They’re not stalking customers in a furniture showroom, but they, make that we, are engaged in what I call “non-sales selling". We’re persuading, convincing, and influencing others to give up something they’ve got in exchange for what we’ve got. In fact, we’re devoting upward of 40 per cent of our time on the job to moving others. And we consider it critical to our professional success.

Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realise.

The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives.

The capacity to sell isn’t some unnatural adaptation to the merciless world of commerce. It is part of who we are. Selling is fundamentally human.

Daniel H. Pink

The Wisdom of Psychopaths

Kevin Dutton

William Heinemann

$26.50

You would think the only thing we would want to learn from psychopaths is how to stay away from them, but British psychologist Kevin Dutton would disagree.

Not only did Professor Dutton have a loving relationship with his psychopathic father, who was a stallholder in the street markets of London, but he travelled the world to ask experts to define what makes a psychopath tick.He even turned himself into a psychopath for half an hour by using electromagnetic induction to switch off the amygdala part of his brain that deals with moral reasoning.

That is how it felt to Dutton, before he went off to meet a friend in a pub, totally smash all his previous records on his favourite electronic driving game . . . and steal someone’s tip off the nearby table.

It appears that the psychopaths’ way of looking at the world – analytically, unhampered by the complications of sentiment – make them highly evolved for today’s business environment.

We know they do very well at work.

“The psychopath seeks reward at any cost, flouting consequence and elbowing risk aside," Dutton writes, adding this may be why researchers found a greater preponderance of psychopathic traits among a sample of chief executive officers than among inmates of a secure psychiatric unit.

So, to be successful in this environment, it would help to have a little of the psychopath inside us.

Dutton says the world is becoming more psychopathic and he explores a theory that it may be related to a decline in reading fiction, which trains our brains to be “more alert to the inner lives of others".

This is an engossing read, well written and enlightening.

Fiona Smith

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